Globetrotters Recall '48 Win Vs. Lakers

JIM LITKE

Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, February 18, 2003

AP Sports Writer

Wednesday marked the 55th anniversary of the best basketball game nobody remembers.

It was a showdown between the all-black Harlem Globetrotters and all-white Minneapolis Lakers, the pro game's version of Texas Western vs. Kentucky meeting in the NCAA final. It matched the two best teams of the time at a watershed moment, with nothing and everything on the line.

"It was electric, as charged an atmosphere as I've ever been in," recalled George Mikan, 78 now, but the Lakers' center then and basketball's first dominant big man.

"Most people came thinking the Lakers would beat us by plenty," said Marcus Haynes, the ballhandling wizard who choreographed the Trotters that night. "Then they saw how much talent there was on both sides, and started cheering every basket.

"And by the end," he added, "most of them were just cheering for overtime."

The game was won by the Globetrotters 61-59 on a last-second shot. It didn't break basketball's color barrier with the suddenness Jackie Robinson's appearance in a big league baseball game had only 10 months earlier, but it caused a deep crack.

The next year, the two leading pro circuits merged to form the National Basketball Association and agreed to maintain a whites-only league during the inaugural 1949 season. That same year, the Globetrotters won the rematch before an even bigger crowd. By 1950, black stars like Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, Chuck Cooper and Earl Lloyd were offered contracts to move on and integrate the NBA.

"It would have happened in time, but those games made the question more immediate," said Mannie Jackson, who played for the Globetrotters in the 1960s and heads the investment group that bought the operation 10 years ago.

"After that, nobody could say any longer all the best players were already in the pros. That's why it's important to remember the Globetrotters from that era. They struggled to open the doors for today's NBA players, but never got their due the way baseball's Negro League players have."

Jackson first learned about the Feb. 19 game from an uncle who was part of the crowd of 17,823, the largest jammed into the old stadium up to that point. Then he saw it portrayed in a 1954 movie about the Globetrotters (with actor Sidney Poitier) titled "Go, Man, Go!"

"In my family, it was regarded like a Joe Louis fight, like one of those stories that gets passed from generation to generation like folklore. But too few people probably realized how important it was at the time. And then, I find it interesting that whenever the NBA traces its lineage, it usually stops right around 1950, just on the other side of the hill from the events we're talking about."

Some people believe the NBA owes its survival, and not just gratitude, to the Globetrotters and other barnstorming operations like the New York Rens. In pro basketball's lean, early years, those teams were better draws and often played the first game of doubleheaders, with league teams playing the nightcap.

It was that drawing power, in fact, that convinced promoters to let the Globetrotters play the Lakers instead of their usual patsies as the preliminary to a Basketball Association of America game between the Chicago Stags and New York Knicks.

Back then, when the Globetrotters played in the South, they often played one game before white audiences in the afternoon and another for blacks at night. Other times, whites occupied the main floor and blacks were relegated to the balcony.The first thing that struck Haynes as he walked onto the stadium floor in Chicago that night was the mixed crowd.

"Between the ballplayers, too, it was more about pride than a black and white thing," said Haynes, who in 1998 became the first Globetrotter player to enter the Hall of Fame. "Quite a few of us on both teams knew each other, we'd practiced together.

"But among the public, too many people considered us strictly as a show team," he paused, "as entertainers."

That wasn't Mikan's problem. His Lakers teams would go on to become pro basketball's first dynasty _ and win six straight against the Trotters after losing the first two _ but that was still off in the future. At the time, he was sharp enough to see the game was about to change because of the Trotters' influence.

"I'd watch them every chance I got, and I admired the way they played. But because of that, because of the funny stuff, people had no idea how good they were," he said. "That's why I wanted to play them. There was a lot of pride at stake."

The Lakers led 9-2 at the quarter and 32-23 by intermission. The Globetrotters had nobody taller than 6-foot-3 to keep the 6-10 Mikan in check, and the Minneapolis center made them pay. But the Globetrotters double-teamed him to start the second half and ran more fast breaks to neutralize Mikan at the other end.

With 90 seconds left and the game tied at 59, Haynes dribbled away all but the final few seconds, then fed Ermer Robinson for a long set shot as the final buzzer sounded.

"It just happened," Haynes said through a soft laugh all these years later, "that we got the ball last."

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Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org.